Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday June 30, 2013 @09:40PM
from the busy-weekend dept.

hypnosec writes with word that "The Linux 3.10 kernel has been officially released on Sunday evening which makes the 3.10-rc7 the last release candidate of the latest kernel which yields the biggest changes in years. Linus Torvalds was thinking of releasing another rc but, went against the idea and went ahead with official Linux 3.10 commit as anticipated last week. Torvalds notes in the announcement that releases since Linux 3.9 haven't been prone to problems and 3.10 is no different."

I really liked a lot about OS/2 Warp... IMHO it's one of the last desktop oriented OSes that would run well on a 50mhz 486 with 8mb of ram (8mb being quite a bit for the time, but still). At some point we really just passed into bloat world. Don't get me wrong, I love having a multi ghz 8-core cpu... but there's something to be said for an OS that could do as much as OS/2 did, as well as it did. Shame that IBM kept it as walled off as it has. Wish that they'd Open-Source what they could from it (Warp 3)

OS/2 is still around and the latest version of 2011 is for sale. Serenity Systems bought the rights to it, now calls it EcomStation 2 and continues development mainly intended as a point of sale system.

not competitive? it's essentially the same price as windows, and in my opinion a superior OS to windows. if one had OS/2 applications or the development tools that can emit OS/2 code (which incidentally I do) it's not unreasonable.

though I'll be sticking with BSD and Linux myself, thanks.

people pay $140 for their windows home premium plus more than that for office software...spending $500 on home computer software is not uncommon

For windows, you have *ALL* the software available that runs on it... one of the reasons it can command the price it does... Linux/BSD are free to download/use with a fair amount of software... Anything else commercial needs to have a serious niche (which OS/2 does for some applications), or be priced below windows or offer more, but that isn't really applicable to a home user at a price that is as much as Windows (more if your computer is pre-loaded with it).

NSA employee here. I checked the IP address and it was actually posted by someone working at Google. His name is Dave and judging by his browser history, he seems to enjoy gay scat porn. His cell phone location logs shows unusual late night visits to known glory holes. He stays there for 1-3 hours at a time, so I guess we know which side of the wall he sits on. I'd I've already hit my daily quote PRISM quota.

Nvidia drivers should be available for the new stable beast by the end of next month. They will get around to it when they are darn good and ready. 3.10-rc1 broke the latest driver. They released a driver about two rc releases ago, but it was still borken. I actually think they released it so that they could say 'see, see, we released a driver just a few weeks ago, so you shouldn't see anything new from us for a while!' It was a fluke that my current hardware build included an nvidia video card (the radeon card I originally bought was borked from the computer store: it wouldn't display video), so I took it back and the only thing they had that was close was an nvidia. They have worked hard to lose me as a customer. I suspect next time they will be successful.

So you have a four year old card that can be upgraded with a $50 new card and you are complaining it doesn't work with bleeding edge? I'd suggest you buy a new ATI card and enjoy the wonderful world of restarting X when you resize a window. Have you actually checked if the ATI driver works with 3.10 before you started this rant? I wouldn't be surprised if it wouldn't work either.

Don't know about that... I was running Ubuntu, and right around Windows 7's public RC, Ubuntu did a release that included a borked intel driver (9.04 iirc)... I couldn't even play YouTube level video anymore, or run Frozen Bubble. Intel was in the middle of a rearchitecting of their Linux driver IIRC, but Ubuntu wouldn't let their release slip, or use an older driver... so 2/3 of the computers out there that happened to be running Intel graphics had a borked UX for anything needing accelerated or 3D render

I agree in that I wish Nvidia would go faster, but what will you do? Run Noveau? The fact remains they DO support Linux, and they do it a helluva lot better than AMD/ATI do.. Now, if you don't run 3-D games that tax the hardware you'll probably be fine. I'm not picking on you so much as expressing frustration at the people who complain about Nvidia. No, their support isn't perfect. Yes, they've stumbled. Yes, they pour most of their resources into the Windows driver because Windows, crappy as it is, has 90% of the market. Mod me down, bitch about what I'm saying, whatever. I run Linux myself with an aging GT240 card. I boot into Windows once a month on my main machine for Patch Tuesday. ATI is not a real viable option, and while Intel graphics is fairly well supported, their 'cards' are not really as powerful. Be patient. There'll be a new driver out soon.

I'm with you in this sentiment generally, though I'm also away of Linus' "fu** you, NVIDIA" moment. Apparently, NVIDIA are annoying collaborators with devs, and not only for video drivers.. so let's not cut them too much slack.

My pet peeve: people complain constantly that NVIDIA "refuses" to open source their drivers. But these people don't understand that it's not a matter of merely deciding to do so: the NVIDIA drivers contain a whole bunch of 3rd-party code that NVIDIA cannot legally open source. It would require either 1) a lot of legal agreements (and likely lots of royalty and lawyer fees) to make 3rd-party agreements, or 2) rewriting the 3rd-party code from scratch, without referring to the original code. Both of these tasks are monumental and very expensive (for task #2, they would have to hire new programmers that have not been "tainted" by having seen the original code).

Specs can't be "just" released for similar reasons: like the code, they are encumbered by patents and copyrights.

NVIDIA have expressed a general will to open source the driver, but it may take years to take it to the next step.

You don't violate a patent by publishing how it works. And you don't violate a patent by publishing the specs of a patent encumbered device. That's one thing patents are made for: You can publish how it works, and still the original inventor (or the current patent holder) doesn't have to fear his revenue stream dies.

Yeah, but the hideous thing about patents is that, even with the published specs, it's illegal to implement them without paying up. So only the patent holder or a direct licensee gets to write a driver for the patented shit. Any roylaties for a patent-encumbered piece of hardware should be included in the price of the hardware - end of story. And that includes your PC - if you paid for an OEM Windows license that covers various patents, that should cover any implementation of those patents on the device.

So what's to stop them opening up those bits that they do own, and then allowing the community to fill in the blanks?Considering people are willing to try writing a complete driver from scratch, replacing a few missing bits in an otherwise complete driver isn't much of a stretch.

Perhaps they can't open source the stuff they own because they're not exactly sure what they own?

Think about a decade of legacy code which may not be completely documented of who each individual author is and what license each line is under. It could be a mess that they'd rather avoid by just helping the open source community write their own code from the ground up.

I have the same video card (in my case, the 1GB gigabyte card, whose fan has failed and which I've replaced with cooler master) and the same logical basis for my decisions. Best video card value I've ever bought. It's slow now, but it worked when I bought it even though it wasn't officially supported since it's derived from another card and it's still working today, many moons later.

The latest AAA games aren't on Linux, so unless you want to use it for GPGPU you just don't need the latest video card. You ca

I have a 7850 and I get frequent X restarts with the latest binary driver after trying to resize a window that has something accelerated in it happening. Also, (not their fault) I can't use oclhashcat with the latest driver. It seems they have quite a few rough edges left to polish out still.

I find all of these whines about nVidia somewhat amusing, in that they have been the most prominent of technology manufacturers who have taken the trouble to support Linux for many years. OK, the laptop I'm using right now has an Intel GPU, but I've lost count of the number of perfectly good nVidia cards I've had to replace, only for the simple reason that motherboard replacements don't have slots that fit them. I have never yet had one break.

Agreed.HD3200 works splendid with Mesa 7.11 or later (GL 3.1 currently), and that's a few years old. Anything new enough before "GCN" (the new architecture that the upper-end HD7000 chips use) has GL 3.1, though GCN is still at 2.1 plus GLSL 1.3 (the version for GL 3.0).HD5xxx up through HD8xxx currently have hardware VDPAU via UVD on Mesa.HD4xxx and up to GCN have better OpenCL support via clover than any other FOSS driver.Power management just got added, and it works.Fedora 19 has good enough support to u

don't blame nvidia for not supporting the ever-mutable internal API of the Linux kernel. it's your fault for trying to run bleeding edge crap; stick with stable polished mainstream distros and you'll always have an nvidia driver

Correction: You can run a select few drivers from Windows XP on Windows 7. Most drivers will not function, even in 32 bit mode, which is why most drivers you download have a separate xp/2k folder. Microsoft pulls this crap all the time.

Windows 3.11 drivers worked in 95, but they changed the framework in 98, then again for 2000, then again in Vista. I'm quite surprised they didn't do it again in 8, because it's been a constant "Every other release" change. Your whole "Windows uses a consistent ABI" thing

Given that 3.10 is not a release, getting new drivers for 3.10-rcX is better than you can expect with WINDOWS so I'm not sure what your bitch is. When I've upgraded Windows (RELEASE software) I've had driver issues for weeks or months while the vendors catch up. This has happened to me every single OS upgrade in Windows land, save for the jump from Windows 95 to Windows 98.

Having a cry about Nvidia's shitty Linux support for this is a bit off the mark, IMHO. They don't even put drivers out for rc vers

How long before it shows up in major distributions such as Linux Mint?

Don't know, but Fedora 18 has 3.9.6-200.fc18.x86_64 and that was a week ago. A quick check of the updates indicates that the 3.9.6 kernel is still the latest. As far as getting the 3.10 kernel goes I would say within a week or two, however it really depends on your distribution and how up to date the maintainers like to keep the repositories.

If you are the repository maintainer for a customer that is using say Redhat Linux (you would be crazy to install a non supported Linux distribution on a production or even development machine) you may have a two to six month delay offset on updates and that is assuming that the customer or company allows 6 monthly updates. In my experience many companies don't like to do any updating once their systems are up and running and it is allot of work on the IT managers side to even get critical patches applied and without the appropriate sign-off's and agreed outages (normally 10 minutes) nothing gets done.

(you would be crazy to install a non supported Linux distribution on a... development machine)

No, I strongly disagree.

You should be able to smash up your development machine with a hammer now, and be back up and running in a few hours. I've run all sorts of stuff as development machines, including distros far out of support for various reasons, and others like Arch which are totally bleeding edge.

Also, hardware aside, I've never screwed up a developement machine so badly that I couldn't put off fiing it un

I'm not 100% certain what you're implying by "non-supported Linux distribution" but if you're referring to that little bullet point on your Dell PowerEdge spec sheet claiming to support "Red Hat" as being some sort of gospel and installing Debian (for example) is "crazy" I must conclude you've been drinking the marketing kool-aid.

Fedora makes available new kernels within a few days, for those that want to play with the latest and greatest. The 3.10 kernel should be available within the next 24 hours using the Fedora rawhide kernel nodebug repository [fedoraproject.org].

Makes perfect sense, the xpad driver is for Xbox controllers... The Xbox and Xbox 360 (as well as PS3 and probably next-gen) controllers already interface via USB so they make great PC controllers as well.

That (totally non-standard) spec you point to has a severe downside: it recommends for pre-releases to have a patch level. That's no only wasteful (it will be always 0), but also makes pre-releases sort AFTER the final:3.0.0-rc1 > 3.0.03.0-rc1 < 3.0.0(because - < . in ASCII).

Most projects I know of, including Linux, use 3.0-foobar for versions leading to 3.0.0.

So I'm supposed to have a magical sorter that hires an oracle for every pair of version numbers, right?

There's a common scheme of comparing them that almost everyone agrees with: sort lexically, taking a string of digits as single symbol: 3.9.2 compares as less than 3.10.1, 3.10a as less than 3.10b. That "semver" proposal doesn't work with that.

Simple string sort says 3.10a > 3.10. "a" and "b" can work like version numbers as in OpenSSL, but they don't work as designations for "alpha" and "beta" unless you're already finagling your sorting algorithm, in which case checking for semver's "1.0.0-alpha" or "1.0.0+a1b2c3" and placing them behind "1.0.0" is hardly more effort. If you're really concerned about making the string sort slightly simpler, then why not put in a change request to make the patch version optional on pre-release versions? There

That's a good point. And yes, I agree that semver is in no way standard. In fact, I was mainly lazy and picked the first semi thorough reference I could find on the classical versioning number scheme, though to be honest I'd rather just distill it to:

A version number is a tuple of integers of decreasing significance separatade by a dot. Whenever one of the integers is incremented by one, the subsequent ones are reset to 0 or removed.

Other shenanigans (such as -rcX) varies between projects, and is usually ea

You are wrong. You are assuming software version numbers are numeric, following a decimal number system. They are not.

They are strings, in this case, of the format : '(major_iteration).(minor_iteration)'. Such a pseudo-numeric format is used for several other denotations. A commonly used one is the date. A less common one is chromosomal locations of your genes. To parse such a string, you must know the rules of the format.

Print this, paste it on your wall. And never whine about software version indicators of any kind ever again.